Books:
Hell of a Book by Jason Mott
I am of two minds re this highly lauded novel about... well there's the issue. My two minds have to do with the fact that the author wrote two related and intertwined stories about BLM (more or less), one of which was so awful and boring that I almost DNFed and really the thing that kept me going was that a Janice rec'ed this book to me (a Janice, btw, whom I'm guessing is already revving up to disagree with most of what I’m about to write) so I kept plowing on. The first story, the incredibly boring one - yes, well-written, the writing is not the issue here - is about an unnamed author on a book tour for his book called Hell of a Book and the fictional author has the extremely unfortunate mental challenge - for the reader - of being often unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary which becomes unbearable to read because, well what am I investing in? If you know the lead character is basically talking to himself the whole time and that plot events either are or aren't occurring or they are but not the way they seem to be then all you have is authorial verbal spluge designed to fluff out the pages which is so friggin' BORING. I mean what do you think about seemingly hundreds of pages devoted to a mentally ill person having an imaginary "relationship" meaning they do or don't meet someone after a book reading and then have a bunch of conversations with that person in their head (or not) and then they just think even more about all that for a while? A long long while. Unfortunately I'd say around 2/3rds of the book is like that. In fact, you could read the first 10% just to get a gist of what's going on, then skip to 60% then read to the end - even though that final 40% repeats the annoyances, it eventually leads to a payoff of sorts.
Even worse these bad parts are written in a kind of jazz riff style, like it all goes off on rhythmically-written tangents which as mentioned cohere in the thematic but the narrative in those sections, amorphous to begin with, becomes harder and harder to grip. It's more like being in someone's thoughts than a story per se and while the thoughts are well-written for me it was just tedious. I had the same reaction to Karl Ove Knaussgard (and - quick look away a few Janices - some Faulkner) so let that be your metric because I think your enjoyment - immersion really - in this book will be based more on whether or not you click with this sort of narrative style which comprises so much of the book. As you can tell, it's definitively not my favorite, and the closest I've come to enjoying books in this style were those of James Robert Baker who wrote two spectacularly great though also somewhat divisive novels (Fuel-Injected Dreams and the, to me, even better Boy Wonder) in which the driving force was style and writing (though honestly there was a decent amount of plot in them as well), divisive because they are definitely love 'em or OMG-I've-never-been-so-bored-in-my-life-and-the-writing's-overrated 'em. Or maybe A Confederacy of Dunces or, since I'm on the topic of books in which their success or, if bored, failure is in their writing and theme rather than in story specifics, I'd probably have to add John Gardner's Mikkelson's Ghosts to this list which, if you like books in the difficult-but-rewarding-slash-or-if-you-don't-click-with-it-just-boring-and-difficult genre - which is the genre Hell of a Book is in - is pretty much right up there with the best/worst of them. I'd say those books were, like this book, also books that had a lot to say but said it more through the way they were written rather than through narrative, though I probably clicked more with those books because they did, in fact, have more narrative than this book.
So that’s the bad part which unfortunately is more of the book than the good part. The good part of the book is much more interesting not so much because of the story (it's about a Black kid and police shootings) but in some ways because that story has happened so frequently that it's become generic and the (actual) author pulls together the threads of both that story and the telling of that story in ways that are affecting and speak to the larger societal issues as well as the deeply personal issues at play around systemic racism. In other words, the anonymous author and all the imaginary stuff isn't pointless - the real author really does link it all thematically in the end - but it's so lopsided, like there's just so much of that imaginary stuff and it's so repetitive and, as noted, dull that it became a real struggle for me to stick with it. I mean I guess I'm glad I did, though it's difficult to recommend this book, despite the fact of how it all comes together and what it says, because it's such a trudge for so much of it.
In any event, the tl;dr (which I guess really should have come first but too bad) on this review is basically know thyself. If you're someone who can push through a lot of go-nowhere tedium and amorphousness or if you're like the Janice who recommended this and flat-out loved this book and perhaps others of this ilk, I'd say go for it because as mentioned the writing is good and it really all adds up to something; if you know yourself to have little tolerance for these sorts of things or have a strong preference for a gripping narrative, I'd say skip it because this will probably end up feeling like (DNFed) homework to you.
TV/Streaming:
Tehran (Season 2):
While I was meh on season 1 of this show oh did I totally love season 2. As a reminder: this is a political/action cat-and-mouse series about a female Israeli spy doing undercover work in Iran. The first season involved - no spoilers - her efforts to break into Tehrani infrastructure in order to plant some kind of device (which we know from the first episode) though we didn't know exactly what all her efforts were adding up to and this gave that season both some drive due to the mystery but also some peak-TV dragginess in that there was a lot of maneuvering but also not a ton of plot thus there was time spent on character stuff that, while specific to the lead and her circumstances, also somehow felt kind of generic because the spy character the writers created was pretty reticent and, of course, lying a lot since she's spying which made it tough to get a grip on her character which in turn made her character stuff feel blah (vague to avoid spoilering). In any event that all went out the window in this season - in the best way - as the writers totally ramped up the plot and, really, the final few episodes got really tense! The story picks up directly in the aftermath of season 1 and while I'm not going to discuss plot at all because there's no meaningful way to do so without spoilering, the writers made the choice this season to let us know the top-level mission (more or less) upfront unlike in season 1, and I thought this was an effective choice in that we knew what needed to be achieved but could also see the enormous obstacles in the way of that goal meaning there was a lot of fun spy stuff around overcoming those obstacles and a real question mark as to whether the goal would be achieved and, if so, how and what would happen as a result. The writers managed to sustain those questions across the season which is what gave it drive and tension. Plus the holdover characters and relationships made total sense and evolved in ways that were linked into the plot and directly impacted it plus the writers decided to introduce a new character played by Glenn Close who, while I was admittedly dubious about her acting (kinda hammy I thought) in the first few episodes, completely delivered on the character as the season continued, meaning it was one more snaky interesting person in the mix. Also while the lead's character had a bit of a maverick, seat-of-the-pants element to her in season 1, the writers really leaned into that more this season which also added to the tension and mystery because, when things went south, you knew she wasn't going to just give up and also knew whatever her next choice was was going to be risky thus tense/fun. Whatever you thought of season 1, I can assure you season 2 is way better and, if you haven't seen this show and enjoy complex political spy stuff in the Homeland vein, well this one's definitely worth a watch.
Big Flower Fight (Seasons 1-2):
This is flower-arranging competition reality show which also serves as proof that there's really such thing as "too low" in my media bottom-feeding. The basic structure of the show is there's a mega group v. group challenge for the first half with the losing group battling it out in an individual challenge for the second half and with the loser of that challenge going home. What makes the show somewhat interesting - barely - is that, for the group challenges, the projects are massive and take all day as in "reproduce this Van Gogh painting entirely in flowers in a 30x20 foot frame" meaning there's at least a big spectacle to watch and, a requirement for me to enjoy a competition reality show, there's a means of judging at the end in that I can look and make up my own mind about which team I think did better. While the judges are annoying, kind of in that trend of judging I've noticed recently where it's all very sassy and snappy/queeny (regardless of sexual orientation) with lots of quote unquote quips they also, as professional florists (I guess), do manage to point out why things did or didn't work and that's marginally interesting. Oh fine not really but here's the thing: for background noise - which is what this is for me - it's pretty good because it's so simple to understand the challenges that you can definitely go do other things or leave the room entirely while the competitors are building stuff and just glance up at the end and see what they came up with. I like watching people's creativity especially so with something as specific as floral arranging where you're witnessing someone's artistic expression in a medium comprised entirely of plants and that's just weird enough to be watchable.
Movies:
Everything Everywhere All At Once - While I was not initially sure about this mindbender adventure - I thought it was a kid's film for the first 10 minutes or so and in some ways I'd say that assessment isn't so far off - in the end it totally blew my (high) mind. The plot is completely, unremittingly insane; in fact the Janice I watched this with and I not only found ourselves incapable of clarifying plot points to each other (no surprise there honestly) but, upon finishing, couldn't imagine how anyone could conceive of, pitch, write, and get financing for this madness - all of which made zero difference because I was entertained for so much of it. I'm going to skip details, I'd like to say to avoid spoilers, but primarily because I'm not sure I have enough of a handle on them to explain them. Basically there's a family - mom, husband, mom's dad, and only-child teenage daughter - who own a laundromat and there's lots of typical family problems as in the mother is tough on the daughter who resents her for it; the mother has her own unpleasant relationship with her dad; the husband is a sometimes parallel-universe jumping martial arts expert who's up to something which I won't spoiler but, essentially, the family dynamic/parallel universe thing? It's not going very well and the entire movie is more or less a humongo-crazy universe-jumping-in-a-kind-of-but-not-really-but-this-is-the-best-I-can-do-Groundhog-Day-sorta-without-the-repeats-way about the realization and later effort on behalf of the mother to both understand and help her daughter see that her life and world can be different. That made no sense, right? That was more or less my entire experience of the film which didn't detract from enjoying it, though in part that was because seeming hours were devoted to trying to understand why anything was happening, what the rules of this parallel-universe-jumping thang were, and an overall WTF’s going on. But I liked it. I got the basic gist of the mother/daughter overarching dramatic theme, there was an enormous amount of kickboxing which is generally a plus in my book, there was a combination of the outright weird (like what Jamie Lee Curtis and her minions were up to I haven't got a clue though I kinda liked it) with the completely stupidly juvenile (there's an entire action sequence devoted to removing superpowered butt plugs), and - and this is the key thing that made me like it whatever its flaws or confusion - the filmmakers had a vision and they went for it. They wanted to tell a story about a mother saving her daughter from a type of teenage hopelessness and they went about it in this way and, yeah I can imagine if this movie isn't clicking with you you'll find it boring, but if it clicks it's pretty entertaining and I admire the iconoclasm behind it (like the butt plugs made it past the early script drafts, all producer notes, the studio, the friends and family screening, and any kind of editorial sense on the part of all involved and there it was, for what felt like 20 minutes, in the final film and hey while I thought it was really dumb the filmmakers definitely committed to their vision), perhaps as a result of having seen 5 billion Marvel movies by this point which all have roughly zero iconclasm, vision, or sense of aspiring to be anything other than dead-center generic, so it was nice to see something in the same genre and honestly with many of the same flaws (a lot of talking, too long, etc.) but also really completely different and at least reaching for something.